On The Cinema Of India and Bangladesh

One of my aims in curating the Hibbleton Film Series is not only to bring underappreciated films from around the world to Fullerton, but to examine how cinema is used as a mirror in various cultures to cultivate a sense of national identity. What does it mean to be American? What does it mean to be Slovakian, or Iranian? Over 100 years of global experiments in cinema have shown precisely how complex this is. Especially in India. How does a nation with over 1600 languages, and tens of thousands of religions, see itself through the lens of cinema? How does it utilize its tremendous machinery to freeze-frame a sense of self and community that can arguably be called “we.”

In his book "Mourning The Nation: Indian Cinema In The Wake Of Partition," Bhaskar Sarkar puts it this way: "Scholars have sought to wean us off the mythopoesis of the nation as primordial, essential, natural. As a result, we now know that the nation is a cultural artifact: an 'imagined community' that rests on the myth of “horizontal comradeship” among its members; an 'ideological form' that presupposes the continuity of a national subject across centuries; one of many 'invented traditions' that political elites have deployed to legitimize their power in the face of revolutionary and democratic challenges. Nationhood leads to the inevitable erasure of difference.”

Finding common ground through cinema was compounded by the fact that Hindus and Muslims have a very different relationship to viewing images. Hindu cinema, largely defined by visualizing the stories of its gods, becomes a sacred space for those watching it because of the Hindu notion of “darshan”: that seeing a depiction of a deity is virtually the same as making actual contact with that deity. India is perhaps the only place in the world where religious ceremonies are performed around cinema screens and television sets as if the deities themselves are present on screen. Major movie stars to have temples built for them, where they are worshipped as though they were the gods they played in a film.

For Muslims, on the other hand, there are absolute prohibitions on the depiction of God and his Prophets, which led to a completely new genre of “Islamicate” films seeking to depict the presence of the divine through and social and cultural life, as in the work of the great Muslim director Mehboob Khan (1906 - 64). Here cinema becomes sacred for an opposing reason, along the lines of Jean-Luc Godard’s observation that cinema is the miracle that enables us to “watch what one can’t see.” Interestingly, both Hindu and Muslim cinema developed through the Zoroastrians in India. Parsi theater had long developed special effects that was augmented by trick photography to evoke the presence of the divine in the cinema of both faiths.

India’s film industry is the largest in the world, yet aside from the work of Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak, even its most commercial films are virtually unknown in the Americas. Even less is known here about the world’s second largest film industry, which is not Hollywood as many believe, but “Nollywood,” the cinema of Nigeria. When asked to curate two months of Indian cinema for Hibbleton Gallery in the fall of 2015, I decided to program a month of films about India by foreigners, followed by a month of non-Bollywood cinema from India. My hope was that this would provide a multi-layered perspective from the outside looking in and the inside looking out.

We began with "Phantom India" (1969), an epic 6-hour masterpiece by Louis Malle, whose work was one of the major inspirations for the French New Wave. Malle wrestles with the major difficulties of understanding India through Western logic or languages. “Only 2% of Indians speak English, the official language after colonization,” Malle says at the opening of the film. “This 2% talks a lot, in the name of all the rest…In learning English, they also learned to think as our civilization does. Their words about their country were ordered by Western symbols and logic. I’d heard them all before. I recognized them as my own. Tattered ideas, worn-out phrases, like Nietzsche’s birds, so exhausted from flying that one can catch them in one’s hand.” Attempting to explore India's complex social fabric without preconceived ideas or conscious efforts to organize reality, Malle uncovers India as a place that has completely reimagined what it means to be human, who we are, what we once were, and the expanded possibilities of what we could be in the future. "Words are useless between us. The image is our only connection," Malle continues. "We may not understand these people, but we’re instinctively connected to them, sharing their link with nature. Letting ourselves go in their presence, we feel as if we’ve rediscovered something we’d lost.”

For example, Malle tracks down the closest living examples of ancient humanity left on the planet (including the Bondo tribe of Orissa and the Toda in the mountains of Tamil Nadu) whose languages have nothing to do with other Indian languages, who have never waged war or made laws, living instead in an egalitarian society without leaders, that is vegetarian despite never taking up agriculture. Malle also examines why Christianity never made much progress in India, despite the fact the Church dates its history in India back to the visit of the apostle Thomas in 52 AD, and why India is the only country in the world that has never persecuted its Jewish population. In my mind, "Phantom India" is not only one of the greatest films ever made on the subject of culture, but also a profound philosophical investigation into the nature of perception, the cinema, and the most accurate portrayal I've seen of what India is actually like.

Thanks to a friend at the National Film Board of Canada, I was able to show the documentary "SHIPBREAKERS" (2004, never before available in the US), about Alang, India, where most of the world's largest ships are run into the shore and torn apart by human ant colonies of 35,000 men with little more than their bare hands. At least one worker dies a day (sometimes hundreds at a time) from explosions, falling steel, asbestos, malaria, or plummeting into the ocean. The Red Cross (which set up a clinic here) cannot find doctors or nurses willing to go. This is where most of the US Navy's ships are sent to die, to deliberately avoid the laws of the Environmental Protection Agency at home which "provides an opportunity for the Department of Defense to maximize the return to the U.S. Treasury" (according to a written statement by the Navy).

Another night was devoted to the documentary "Born Into Brothels," in which Zana Briski, a New York City photographer, moves into the red light district of Calcutta to document the lives of the women there. She decides to put cameras in the hands of the children who are born and raised in the brothels and give them photography workshops, not only to see that world through their eyes, but to give them the chance to find beauty in their own perceptions. When she discovers how powerfully it transforms their view of themselves and the world around them, Briski goes on to develop photography workshops in marginalized communities around the world, working with Israeli and Palestinian children to better understand each other's lives in Jerusalem's Old City, Haitian child domestic servants, and children living in garbage-collecting communities in Cairo.

We closed the first month with "Gandhi" (1982), Richard Attenborough's dramatization of the life of Mohandas Gandhi (played by Ben Kingsley), who overthrew the world's largest empire through radical commitment to non-violence. The film provided context for the following week's presentation of films from the silent and early "sound" eras of Indian cinema, many of which were engaged in an ambitious project: the possibility of locating national identity in establishing peace between India's proliferation of religious groups, especially Hindus and Muslims. The enormity of this task (which was taken quite seriously), was described well by poet Octavio Paz, who became Mexico’s ambassador to India in 1962: "The presence of the strictest and most extreme form of monotheism alongside the richest and most varied polytheism is, more than a historical paradox, a deep wound. Between Islam and Hinduism there is not only an opposition, but an incompatibility... Music was one of the things that united the two communities. Exactly the opposite occurred with architecture and painting. Compare Ellora with the Taj Mahal, or the frescoes of Ajanta with Mughal miniatures. These are not distinct artistic styles, but rather two different visions of the world.”

[Pictured above: Shipbreakers in Alang, India]

Some of the Indian films shown and discussed in this series include:

The films of D. G. Phalke who, trained as a magician by one of the 40 employed by the Lumiere Brothers, gave birth to Indian cinema with the first timelapse film ever made. He soon made India's first feature film ("Raja Harishchandra," 1912), about the release of the divine feminine creative power (trishakti) which Hindus believe is the primordial cosmic energy responsible for creation and the agent of all change. Also, "Lanka Aflame" (1917) in which the monkey god Hanuman sets fire to the city of Lanka with his tail), "Shri Krishna Janma" (1918), "Kaliya Mardan" (1919) in which Krishna has an underwater battle with the snake Kaliya before assuming the weight of the entire universe and dancing the beat of time onto his head, and other films that established Phalke as the Méliès of Indian cinema.

Four films by V. Shantaram: "Maya Machchindra" (1932), based on a tantric legend and set in the remote world of Nath yogis (the sect of which Shiva himself was the first yogi), examining the Hindu concept that the world is "maya" (roughly "web of illusion"). "Churning The Ocean Of Nectar" (1934) a meditation on the validity of animal and human sacrifices in religion. "Padosi" (1941) explores Hindu-Muslim unity in pre-independence India through the relationship of chess partners in a village. Finally, "Two Eyes, Twelve Hands" (1957), about the 'open-prison' experiment of Swatantrapur, in which a Jain jail warden tests criminal reform without incarceration, in the spirit of Gandhian ideology.

Vishnupant Damle and Sheikh Fattelal's 1936 film "Sant Tukaram," about the 17th century Maharashtra bhakti yoga saint, whose poetry articulates some of the challenges posed by the Bhakti movement against caste hierarchies and ritual / scripture based conceptions of Brahmanic religion. It features one of the great scenes in cinema history, when Tukaram is carried off to heaven on the bird-chariot Garuda, the vehicle of Vishnu.

Muslim director Mehboob's Khan's "Humayun" (1945) a historical epic about the Mughal empire in India (an era in which Muslims spread religious tolerance and egalitarian principles toward all religions and ethnic groups) featuring stunning and massive elephant battles. We also discussed how Mehboob filters history through cinema to influence Hindu-Muslim relations in the last year's before India's independence. Mehboob Khan is perhaps best known for the national epic "Mother India" (1957). Given Islamic restrictions on the depiction of God and his Prophets, there is no equivalent “Islamic” film to parallel the mythological and devotional films of Hinduism, but there are "Islamicate" films concerned with religion as part of everyday social and cultural life among Muslims, rather than religious belief per se.

Three films by Satyajit Ray: "The Music Room" (1958), which ravishingly depicts an aging zamindar who gathers the last great artists of traditional Indian music into his crumbling Bengal palace across the river from the newly designated East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) to embrace of a way of life about to disappear forever. "Devi" (1960) about a man who believes his daughter-in-law is an incarnation of the goddess Durga). And the psychedelic fairy tale "GOOPY GYNE BAGHA BYNE" (1969). We also discussed Ray's relationship to three of the central figures trying to forge their vision of what the new nation of India could contribute to the world leading up to (and after) independence in 1947: Rabindranath Tagore (who gave his Nobel Prize money to disseminate education in poetry and joy), Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru (who sought to modernize and establish egalitarian treatment of all religions during his term as India's first Prime Minister).

A presentation on the cinema of Bengali filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak, who drew on Jungian psychology, Indian aesthetics, Soviet montage, and the comparative mythology of Joseph Campbell to explore the partition of Bengal and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) as a microcosm of India's collective unconscious. Ghatak, whose films from Bengal and Bangladesh emerged from his work as a central figure in the IPTA, a 1940s street collective now considered to be the “only instance of a cultural avant-garde in contemporary Indian history" who brought song, dance, and drama to villages throughout Bengal (adapted to local contexts) to educate, mobilize collective resistance, and organize the struggle for freedom, social progress, and economic justice after famine killed 3 million Bengalis in 1943, most of which could have been avoided. Ghatak also became one of the great living oracles of the collective psychological ripple effects from the Partition of Bengal and Bangladesh.

After an introductory immersion into Ghatak's films "The Cloud-Capped Star" (1960) and "A River Called Titas" (1973), Tuni Chatterji came in person to present her magnificent film "Okul Nodi" (Endless River) a contemplative documentary about Bhatiyali, the boatman's song of Bangladesh. Effectively a sonic bridge between Bangladesh and Bengal, the sound of the voice creates a drone designed to travel over the water, which acts as a conduit both scientifically and metaphorically, to reach the ears of those waiting on the other side of Partition. Many of the songs in "Okul Nodi" are sung by the late Ranen Roy Choudhury who worked closely with Ritwik Ghatak and sang for many of his films, making Choudhury himself a bridge between the two filmmakers.

Another night was devoted to important women of Indian cinema, which included Aparna Sen's 1989 film "Sati" (about a mute girl who marries a tree to avoid sati, the tradition of burning widows alive on their husband's funeral pyre), an overview of films by Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay, Kama Sutra, Monsoon Wedding) and an introduction to the work of Arundhati Roy, author of "The Algebra of Infinite Justice" and "The Ladies Have Feelings, So...Shall We Leave It To The Experts?"

The final week of the series included Anand Patwardhan's documentary "Ram Ke Naam" (In The Name Of God, 1991). Patwardhan, whose films are often shot in secret and cut into segments to be smuggled abroad and reassembled outside the country, explores a common theme of early Indian cinema: can India set an example to the world by rooting national identity in communal harmony between Hindus and Muslims no matter how much vulnerability this entails? Does denigrating another person’s religion degrade one's own? Part of a trilogy of documentaries examining the integration of religious fundamentalism into India's political parties, and whether the psychology of violence against “the other” may lie in male insecurity, (itself an inevitable product of the very construction of “manhood"), "In The Name Of God" focuses on the deadly riots that erupted across India after thousands of Hindu fundamentalists made the 1990 "rath yatra" (chariot journey) to destroy the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, which is believed to be built over the sacred birthplace of the Hindu God Lord Ram.

The series concluded with Shivendra Singh Dungarpur's documentary "Celluloid Man" (2012) which explores the life and work of the one man who single-handedly preserved India's cinema heritage, archivist P. K. Nair, founder of the National Film Archive of India and guardian of Indian cinema.